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Bellum omnium contra omnes

Daily Archives: 06/21/2008

Greetings one and all, Mikey the Rhino here. I have only a small amount of stuff for you today, but Happily for me, I am at home enjoying a rare Saturday off from work. I have the entire weekend off because this weekend is Me and My wife’s One year Wedding Anniversary! Few things Of a political nature this weekend, or at least today, due in part to that.

I have been fairly busy today, and have not yet gotten to listening to Scott McClellan’s House Judiciary Testimony. The closest I have gotten to it is to read some of his opening Statement….which also happens to be one of the few things I actually got to listen to live. Ah well. I know it’s out there. No worries, I’ll get to it.

I just tried to access it via C-span.org and It had a link to it, but that Link did not work for me, I probably just need to download some program or other, It looks like it just won’t play within IE. Maybe later I’ll give it a shot on Mozilla Firefox. not the new one, I don’t have that …..yet.

Abuse of the System: I am currently reading a story here on washingtonpost.com and I have to tell you, I am not surprised at all. It is the story of how some 27,000 organizations and individuals, despite owing $2,000,000,000 in back taxes were in fact paid Untold millions of dollars in Medicare payments. examples follow: Quoting the Washington Post story.

Some cases cited in the new report were especially egregious. They included a nursing home operator with a history of asset concealment schemes who filed $15 million in Medicare claims while owing $7 million in unpaid taxes and establishing a charitable foundation that purchased luxury cars for the owner’s personal use.

And there was the hospital that collected $21 million in Medicare fees while owing $15 million in taxes, mostly for failing to forward to the Internal Revenue Service payroll taxes that were withheld from employees’ checks.

The thought that strikes me most here, is not that these things are happening and how awful it is, that’s kind of a gimme, or that this is really stupid, and how can we let this kind of abuse happen, because that’s also kind of a gimme, if you give people a chance to abuse a system they think of as abusive, or oafish and stupid, they are going to take advantage. The thought that strikes me isn’t that it is 94% of providers are playing by the rules. $400,000,000,000 out of $402,000,000,000 is given to organizations that are acting completely above board. The thought here is, WHY are we spending that much money and how much of that expenditure is actually necessary?

$400,000,000,000. Think about that Number. 14.3 percent of the population is using that much money on health care costs. What does it costs to keep us ALL healthy as a nation? a trillion dollars a year? $1,500,000,000,000? How Much of this cost is driven by the Insurance companies? How much of this Insanely high price is being paid to people who have nothing to do with the actual health of the people in question? I would really like to know. I have never thought to look, and at this point am not really sure where to start. But I tell you this. Before I go to vote In November, I will have that Information, and so will you, dear reader. I will make sure that every piece of Information that I can get my hands on, on this subject, and as many others as I can wrap my head around. But especially this one, just because this story gives me the impression that there is something there that needs to be investigated. And America needs to know what’s up here.

A video for you: This one is about Medicaid and how the system abuses it, to the tune of $64,000,000,000 annually. Just another way in which we, the little guy, gets screwed. This Video is more about billing and improving cash flow for Hospitals, but I think that to get this subject nailed down and learn as much as possible, we have to look at it from all angles.

That’s it for me. I would have put in more stuff, like run info, or Guitar stuff, but I didn’t play all that much, and there really isn’t that much to tell about it. I might drop another blog in later tonight, Not sure about that, we’ll see.

Today’s Nuggets: Time ripens all things; no man is born wise. Miguel de Cervantes

Re-examine all you have been told . . . Dismiss what insults your Soul. Walt Whitman

By three methods we may learn wisdom: First, by reflection, which is noblest; Second, by imitation, which is easiest; and third by experience, which is the bitterest. Confucius